Book Reviews

Jane Bennett. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. xxii + 176 pages. ISBN
0822346338 (paper). $21.95.

Reviewed by Bryan E. Bannon, Wesleyan University

Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter is a provocative addition to the emerging

literature redefining the natural world outside the confines of mechanis-
tic and teleological metaphysics. While Vibrant Matter does not address
itself to authors writing within speculative realism or Deleuzian materi-
alism, the text has affinities with both. Building on her previous book,
The Enchantment of Modern Life (Princeton, 2001), where she argues for a
renewed attention to the ethical value of affects in addressing human
malfeasance toward the material world, Vibrant Matter turns its attention
toward the “thing power” that produces these affects. In this sense,
Bennett’s vital materialism is akin to theories such as Val Plumwood’s
“weak panpsychism” from Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (Routledge,
1993) and David Abram’s terrestrial animism from The Spell of the Sensuous
(Vintage, 1997). What these three positions have in common is their
sincere attempt to provide a materialist philosophy that does not rely
upon traditional definitions of matter as passive, inactive, and unitary.
Unlike Plumwood and Abram who argue that nature is in some way a
subject, Bennett emphasizes the “active powers issuing from non-sub-
jects” (ix).
As in The Enchantment of Modern Life, Bennett’s choice of themes is
broad and varied. For example, there are chapters in which she deals
with metaphysical questions concerning the constitution of reality and
the nature of individuality, some devoted to the intellectual history of
vitalism, and others that analyze real world phenomena such as eating
and the debate over stem-cell research in the terms of the account of
vital materialism she develops. In the process, she marshals a wide ar-
ray of thinkers, ranging from Lucretius to Foucault, in the name of her
conviction that each thinker’s work in certain ways indicates the pres-
ence of “a life” within matter. Following Deleuze, Bennett defines life as
“an interstitial field of non-personal, ahuman forces, flows, tendencies,
and trajectories” (61). To establish matter as vital, Bennett creatively
synthesizes Latour’s work with Deleuze and Guattari’s. Those familiar

Environmental Philosophy 5 (1), 1-17.

Copyright © 2011 by The International Association for Environmental Philosophy.
Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved.
2 Environmental Philosophy

with these thinkers will find themselves on recognizable terrain: ma-

terial bodies are taken to be “assemblages,” aggregates of interacting
bodies and forces, which interact with other assemblages to form larger
networks of agency. By revealing how human agency is only possible
within larger assemblages of bodies, Bennett claims to be “raising the
status of the materiality of which we are composed,” which in turn initi-
ates an alternative form of self-interest wherein pursuing what is good
for oneself involves protecting the agency of the larger assemblage (12–
13).
She returns to this theme of a new self-interest several times within
the text in order to advance her second stated goal “to encourage more
intelligent and sustainable engagements with vibrant matter and lively
things” (viii). Here she is very close to Plumwood’s position in Envi-
ronmental Culture that non-anthropocentric prudent actions (i.e., actions
that respect material/natural agency) are the appropriate foundation
for an environmental ethic. Bennett understands agency in a less teleo-
logical manner than does Plumwood, however, defining agency as the
“not fully predictable encounters between multiple kinds of actants”
(97), thereby following Latour in distributing the agency for any par-
ticular act across a variety of kinds of bodies. Agency thereby becomes
a social phenomenon, where the limits of sociality are expanded to in-
clude all material bodies participating in the relevant assemblage. The
self, as an assemblage, has a much broader set of interests than previ-
ously thought because there is no clear demarcation of what constitutes
one’s “own” body.
This point allows Bennett to transition from her more general on-
tological claims to the implications of her ontology for political ecol-
ogy that she reckons with in the final two chapters. While she does not
believe that there is any one specific ethic that follows from the ontol-
ogy (84), she uses the notion of the assemblage to establish an analogy
between ecological systems, societies, and individual bodies. On the
basis of their structural parallelism, she reinterprets Dewey’s account
of “a public” in terms of vital materialism: within any physical system,
different bodies impede the ability of other bodies to move in an unob-
structed fashion precisely because they are affecting those others. When
a group of bodies encounters effects within the system that decrease
their own ability to affect and be affected, they form a public that will
attempt to respond collectively to the repression of their activity (101).
An ecological public, then, is a group of bodies, some human, most not,
that are subjected to harm, defined as a diminished capacity for action.
Recognizing our entanglement within larger assemblages, we become
more sensitive to the demands of these publics and the reformulated
sense of self-interest calls upon us to respond to their plight. Of course,
Bennett retains the central importance of human vital needs because “I
 Book Reviews 3

identify with members of my species, insofar as they are bodies most

similar to mine” (104). So the self-interest of vital materialism still re-
tains a degree of the speciesism prevalent within the traditional moral
and political theories Bennett critiques.
At this point, a number of questions emerge concerning the basic
approach of the text. Bennett’s main concern is, again, to reveal the
capacity to affect and be affected that resides within material bodies (5). In
other words, the vitality of a material body is a property or power re-
siding within actants qua matter, which is why she discusses the effects
of assemblages as emergent properties (24). As Bennett acknowledges,
however, it is possible that the vital qualities of material bodies are the
result of a benign anthropomorphism. Consequently, Bennett weakens
her claim concerning the vitality of matter to mean only that “every-
thing is, in a sense, alive” (117, emphasis added). Given her claim that
“a careful course of anthropomorphism can help reveal that vitality,”
we are left to wonder whether the vitality of material bodies is a result,
as David Abram holds, of perception being animistic rather than of an
asubjective vital power. If, on the other hand, we say that human beings
(or perceiving beings in general) are not necessary for matter to possess
vital properties, we must ask how vital materialism differs significantly
from current conceptions of causality within complex systems extant
within the ecological sciences.
Rather than undermining Bennett’s theory, however, these com-
ments are meant to forward the political project of vital materialism
without claiming that matter is in some sense alive. It may prove more
fruitful, in other words, to depersonify ecological systems further and
focus on the nature of the relations that obtain between bodies. It is
unproblematic to assert that all existing bodies are affective and sus-
ceptible to affectation, and one need not equate this two-sided capacity
with life, even the asubjective life of metal Bennett describes. If life is
a field of intensities in the way Bennett describes, then, far from being a
property, it is a particular way of relating to the affections that surround
an assemblage. Thus, on Bennett’s own account, it is possible to assert
that matter itself is not alive per se, but that life denotes a particular
intricacy of responsiveness within complex alliances between smaller
constituent assemblages. Rather than assemblages possessing vital
emergent properties, we can say that the complexity of a system can
lead to the increasing non-linearity of responses. This non-linearity in
no way requires perceptive beings in order to occur, but since various
material assemblages exhibit an astonishing range of variability with
respect to how they respond to similar affects, we can retain Bennett’s
sense of distributive agency without attributing a somewhat ambiguous
sense of life to the assemblage or to its constituent parts.
4 Environmental Philosophy

The purpose of these suggestions is not to reinstate a hierarchy of

beings, but to characterize more precisely what constitutes a harm with
respect to different types of systems. Doing so might provide greater
guidance concerning the normative implications of the ontology, which
Bennett laments not having the time to provide (122). One of the most
interesting (and controversial) moments in the text occurs in these fi-
nal pages where Bennett argues that humans, as members of ecologi-
cal communities, will in some cases be called upon to intervene within
those communities in order to preserve them. Analyzing the impact of
certain ways of participating in the system in terms of the kinds of re-
lationships these behaviors enable and foreclose could be an effective
means of determining what a good life might be like within the confines
of an ecological community.
To conclude, Vibrant Matter gives readers a great deal to consider
relative to its slim size. While some of the arguments contained therein
would benefit both from further elaboration and from more direct en-
gagement with some of the existing thinking on the specific subjects
she considers, Vibrant Matter will reward readers by opening many fields
of inquiry that require responses. The reconceptualization of the ma-
terial world that Vibrant Matter represents is a meaningful step in the
direction of reformulating many of the debates within environmental
philosophy that continue to retain the vestiges of overt dualism and its
less obvious manifestation in the subject-object distinction.

Simon P. James. The Presence of Nature: A Study in Phenomenology and

Environmental Philosophy.
Hampshire, England and New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
176 pages. ISBN 0230222366 (cloth). $85.00.

Reviewed by Nahum Brown, University of Guelph

In The Presence of Nature, Simon James proposes that we ought to be at-

tentive to the natural world. This seemingly straight-forward, innocu-
ous suggestion initializes a forceful critique, not only of what James
calls “the standard approaches” of environmental ethics—which are,
in James’s terms, overly abstract and not based on experience—but
equally of phenomenological method. Against a tradition that views
phenomenology as purely descriptive, James reveals a thoroughly pre-
scriptive phenomenology. We ought to be attentive to the natural world
because it is through such attention that we gain phenomenological
clarity. For James, to perceive things as they really are is a moral virtue.
What is both difficult and excellent is to let things appear, not formed
by abstract human concepts, but just as they naturally appear in the